Dr. Engel contributed Chapter 10 in Memory and Affect in Shakespeare's England, edited by Jonathan Baldo and Isabel Karremann (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
In this chapter Engel examines the dramaturgical "cuing the past" through spoken directives to recall things preceding the play's chronology. Shakespeare's ingenious staging of "the tug of memory" -grounded in traditional mnemotechnic oratorical tactics- elicits and guides the audience's affective response to some specific aspect of a character's backstory. Special attention is given to "invention"and "memory" from classical rhetoric (where the relationship of affect to emotion is shown to function analogously to that of invention to invented text), by way of illustrating how the appositive yet complementary tropes of "augmentation" and "abbreviation" in Merchant of Venice and Comedy of Errors, for example, can be used to unpack the rampant play of proverbs in Henry V (3.7). Shakespeare's affective cueing of the past sets memory to work, tugging at what is to be recalled and yanking it center stage for all to see and then factor into their judgment of the character.
